Image CC @ Wikipedia

This week, my article on research data management and collaboration inside and outside the academic library was published in Partnership.  And here’s my shameless plug: you should go read it now.  The article examines the different facets of research data management – collection, access, use, and preservation – and it locates them within the different part of the academic library. It is also advocates for real collaboration with our peers and stakeholders across the entire university, such as our colleagues in Research Offices and Research Ethics Boards (IRBs for our American friends).

The article also examines the current policy gap regarding RDM in Canada, as well as ongoing efforts by different groups to develop RDM provisions in our granting formulas, and to provide resources and share expertise in order to ensure that we don’t create a paper tiger. What’s needed is not just policy but action, and both must be considered in the same breath.

Here’s the article’s abstract:

Research data management (RDM) has become a professional imperative for Canada’s academic librarians. Recent policy considerations by our national research funding agencies that address the ability of Canadian universities to effectively manage the massive amounts of research data they now create has helped library and university administrators recognize this gap in the research enterprise and identify RDM as a solution. RDM is not new to libraries, though. Rather, it draws on existing and evolving organizational functions in order to improve data collection, access, use, and preservation. A successful research data management service requires the skills and knowledge found in a library’s research liaisons, collections experts, policy analysts, IT experts, archivists and preservationists. Like the library, research data management is not singular but multi-faceted. It requires collaboration, technology and policy analysis skills, and project management acumen.

This paper examines research data management as a vital information, technical, and policy service in academic libraries today. It situates RDM not only as actions and services but also as a suite of responsibilities that require a high level of planning, collaboration, and judgment, thereby binding people to practice. It shows how RDM aligns with the skill sets and competencies of librarianship and illustrates how RDM spans the library’s organizational structure and intersects with campus stakeholders allied in the research enterprise.

For what it’s worth, collaboration has been a real buzzword at IASSIST40 and I’ve already been to a few presentations that share similar arguments as mine, and which definitely have the same spirit. I hope we’re all on to something with this, and I hope that we in Canada can get up to speed with our counterparts in other countries.

Finally, this paper began in part from an Introduction to RDM session that I co-presented with Jeff Moon of Queen’s University at OLA in January 2014 (details here).  Jeff has also written a great article on research data management, and it appears in the same issue of Partnership.  He is on the forefront of RDM in Canada and knows how to get things done, so be sure to read his work, too.

-ms